21c art vitrines feature works by local artists

As part of 21c Museum Hotel Durham’s commitment to exhibiting works by both established and emerging artists, installations created by Triangle-area artists are featured in the art vitrines on the guest room floors. Artist on view in the inaugural art vitrine program include Bill Fick, Jeff Whetstone, Harrison Haynes, Brian Gonzales, Stacey Lynn Waddell and Damian Stamer.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Jeff Whetstone

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jeff Whetstone has been photographing and writing about the relationship between humans and the environment since receiving a Zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. Whetstone received his MFA from Yale University in 2001, where he won the Sakier prize for photography. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a body of photographs entitled New Wilderness. A recipient of North Carolina Arts Fellowships in both photography and film, Jeff Whetstone has been professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the past eight years.

Brian Gonzales

Brian Gonzales received his BFA from East Carolina University and an MFA from the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. “Reminiscing on past experiences in hotels, I settled on the idea that a hotel’s goal is to provide the comforts of home while away from home. I am the son of Latin American immigrants from Mexico and Honduras. I visited Punta Sal National Park and photographed the tiny islands that dot the northern coast of Honduras. Whenever I look at these photographs they remind me of an exotic place that provided all the comforts of home, when home was thousands of miles away.”

Bill Fick

Bill Fick received his B.A. from Duke University in 1986 and his M.F.A. from University of North Carolina-Greensboro in 1990. He is the founding director of Supergraphic, a printmaking studio in Durham, North Carolina. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.“My current work focuses on frightening monster images that reflect society’s ever-growing fear and anxiety of all things different and unfamiliar. These images are presented in a variety of forms including prints, t-shirts, posters and tattoos.”

Stacy Lynn Waddell

Stacy Lynn Waddell received her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. “My studio practice is an effort to appropriate the power invested in linguistics, historical record and cultural leitmotifs. Each provides a fitting context for me to critique a pervasive lineage of contradictions and misunderstandings that remain relevant. The formal and perceptual issues presented in my work begin as an appropriative gesture. For this commission, I have selected an image from the portfolio of 19th century American lithographers Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives to both critique the intervention and newly minted powers of photography as well as shed light on the grim, ever-present ideological reality that this scene presents.”

Harrison Haynes

Harrison Haynes received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in New York. “I grew up in Durham. For a time my mom worked just down the street from here, and I remember accompanying her to the spacious lobby of the Central Carolina Bank (CCB), this building’s anchor tenant, so she could deposit a check. Artists, over the course of their lives, whether they like it or not, become practically familiar with the ruining and repairing of walls. We keep knives and spackle on our studio shelves, yet most of us would not count these as materials. When asked to produce images for these newly finished walls, Grace Jones’ Demolition Man kept running through my head. Turns out the song has nothing to do with construction workers, but the lines ’walking disaster’ and ‘three-line whip’ had nice chemistry with the photographs, so I swiped them.”

Damien Stamer

Damien Stamer received his BFA in painting from Arizona State University and his MFA from UNC Chapel Hill. “I paint places that would rather be left alone. Dark woods and dried out fields glimmer for me now as they did on childhood expeditions with my twin brother. Our adrenaline-tinged memories persist in my trespasses, telling of forgotten barns and abandoned houses—their disheveled rooms pregnant with secrets. While today’s solitude halves my anticipation, it doubles the anxiety, reminding me that someone could have been here twenty years or twenty minutes ago. My unease in these seemingly empty places becomes muffled by stories; they ghost up from the debris before vanishing like their tellers.”